Review by Choice Review
Seaton began teaching Chinese literature at the University of North Carolina in 1968, and over the ensuing decades has translated or co-translated and edited many collections of traditional Chinese poetry. Though the 380 poems collected here appeared in one or more of those volumes, this is Seaton's first anthology to cover three millennia of Chinese literary history, and it includes representative works by China's greatest poets. He groups poets into historical periods, and for each he provides a helpful introduction that offers social, cultural, and literary contexts for the poems that follow. Seaton's translation style represents an ideal accommodation between two extremes of so-called fidelity: denotative (attempting to translate word-for-word into the target language) and poetic (attempting to re-create the sublime experience in the target language). He succeeds so admirably that most of his translations qualify as poems in their own right. Seaton's style places him in a unique position among the best-known 20th-century translators of Chinese poetry: he is more poetic than Arthur Waley and more denotatively accurate than Ezra Pound. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All readers; all levels. J. W. Walls emeritus, Simon Fraser University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Mindful of Robert Frost's famous maxim, Poetry is what is lost in translation, Seaton yet risks the loss for the sake of opening doors otherwise closed to readers lacking Chinese. This collection spans decades of Seaton's work and almost 4,000 years of Chinese poetry. It is strongest on T'ang Dynasty (618-905 C.E.) work, weakest on post-nineteenth-century poetry, hence best as a historical introduction rather than a window on contemporary China. Throughout, Seaton scrupulously adheres to his conviction that meaning--the purpose of the poem--takes precedence over music and form. That stance is a matter of heated debate among translators, for which readers can be grateful because of the new and different versions of old poems it engenders. Seaton's introductory essays place his selections in context, offer brief entree to some of the challenges Chinese poses to readers of English, and provide an overview of Chinese poetic forms. The essays as much as the translations make the book a fine gateway to China's long poetic tradition. --Steven Schroeder Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
